Former Prime Minister and JD(S) chief H D Deve Gowda has revealed that in early 1997, he refused to go in for a nuclear test despite persistent pleas to the contrary from the nation’s leading scientists. He was Prime Minister from June 1996 to April 1997.

“The issue (going in for a follow-up to the 1974 Pokharan test) came up before me sometime at the end of January or early February of 1997. Certain leading scientists, officials (he mentioned no names) came to me and tried to persuade me for two and a half hours on going in for a nuclear test,” Deve Gowda told The Financial Express. “But my answer was no,” he said.

“The primary reason not to conduct another nuclear test was not the fear of American sanctions but because I didn’t want relations in the sub-continent to be spoilt. We wanted to improve our relations with our neighbours,” Deve Gowda said.

He added that by then, dates had been fixed for holding bilateral talks with Pakistan and he did not want anything to disrupt the process.

Incidentally, it was two years earlier, in the winter of 1995, when P V Narasimha Rao was PM that there was also talk of a nuclear test. Whether the US found out and put pressure against testing or whether Rao had no real plan to test has been the subject of much speculation, most recently last August, when Jaswant Singh claimed there was a “mole” in the Rao PMO who tipped off Washington.

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